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Disney’s DESCENDANTS First Trailer is… Peppy? Let’s Go With Peppy.

I’m getting to the point where I’m exactly old enough that a necessary (and welcome!) distance from “youth culture” on the whole and regular interactions with the teen-and-under set not really existing for the most part is beginning to make the tail-end of The Millennials look increasingly alien to me – which is a red flag in my business. So I try to keep an open mind when regarding stuff clearly aimed as far away from me as humanly possible.

That having been said, here’s the trailer for Disney’s ambitious “what if our characters had kids and they all went to school together” TV movie project DESCENDANTS:

To be honest? The main thing jumping out at me here is how little the Disney Channel house-style seems to have changed since I was “that age.” The pop-culture cues are different (no way Carlos would’ve been played quite so outwardly… “fashionable” in the 90s, yes?), the basic energy and attitude are pretty-much the same – which sort of throws into sharp relief just how much what we think of as organically-occurring cultural “vibes” are shaped by media. Disney Channel has effectively staked itself as the driver of late-GenX and Millennial tweenhood, and that’s that.

Oh, the movie? Looks cute. The whole thing sort of feels like a DeviantArt project that someone greenlit to series as a joke, but there’s potential here and I like that it looks notably different from ONCE UPON A TIME. If nothing else, it’s a marvel of how good Disney is at working their iconography machine: Even without the names and most obvious cue(s) present in this trailer, you can pretty easily tell who the King and Queen are supposed to be, so that’s amusing, right?

Whatever. You can pretty much tell this thing is going to be absolutely huge, and a decade from now we’ll be reading thinkpieces from now-35-year-old Millennials explaining why it actually wasn’t as disposable as it was judged to be in it’s day. So, look forward to that I guess?